X-bit labs

Friday, January 27, 2006

Technology Gadgets of Tomorrow Showcased. A Peek at Tomorrow’s Coolest Tech

2:32 pm | Anton Shilov

Technology innovation has been going on for millions of years: some developments ignited technology revolution, some remained as distinctive features of pretty rare devices.

Tens of thousands ages ago invention of the wheel gave a massive boost for innovation. Two centuries ago Abraham-Louis Breguet invented technology called Regulateur a Tourbillion in a bid to outsmart gravity and ensure that time never strays out of equilibrium on mechanical watches, but while the technology was promising, it is rarely used today and only on very high-end devices.

BusinessWeek Online offers its readers to look at the next-generation technology products, some of which may become massive and some – vanish into oblivion.

Among the products the web-site proposes to take a look at are the following:

• Philips Momento digital-video player. Like a snow-globe, the Momento is designed to fit in your palm. Thanks to motion sensors, it turns on when you approach it. The sensors allow you to move from video clip to clip by shaking the device.
• Plantronics Bijoux concept for a jewelry-like headset takes the idea to a new level. The ear buds fit snugly, and the speaker hangs elegantly around your neck. The set is as stylish as any pair of earrings and a matching pendant.
• Lunar Design’s MicroMedia Paper – in concept stage only – is a highly visual concept of electronics paper that may serve as a digital media player eventually.

BusinessWeek: A Peek at Tomorrow's Coolest Tech. 

ATI Talks Radeon X1900 Architecture. ATI Presents In-Depth Look at the Latest GPU

2:31 pm | Anton Shilov

ATI’s new Radeon X1900-series products are fast enough for current games and promise high performance for future titles too. But there will definitely be disputes between supporters of Nvidia hardware that offers a more conservative architecture and backers of ATI’s more forward-looking, but sometimes less speedier for today approach.

Beyond3D web-site has published an interview with ATI’s Eric Demers and Richard Huddy, who explain the reasons why ATI believes that incorporating three times more pixel shader processors (which consist of ALUs, arithmetic logic units) compared to texture units (sometimes referred as TEX) is a right balance for future and current needs of games.

“It’s also a chicken and egg thing, in that ISVs [independent software vendors] will tell us what they are doing, but they will also be influenced to designing games with our new technology in mind. If we come out with 3:1 ALU:TEX ratio HW [hardware], then designers will tend to add more ALUs for next games, and so it's a mutually influenced evolution,” says Eric Demers.

When asked about the ratio between texture units and raster (ROP) units, it was said that although right now there is a need to maintain 1:1 proportion, there will be no need for that ratio in future.

“Right now, they seem to balance at 1:1 (TEX:ROP), but the trend is towards lowering ROPs, in general. The reality is that shading per pixel is increasing, which usually means many ALUs and many textures per pixel, as well as many cycles per pixel. Since we need only 1 ROP per cycle per pixel, effectively, the ROP throughput requirement is going down on new apps. An RV530 is a prime example – It doesn’t have more ROP than the R515, but having triple the shading and double the Z, it’s around 2x the speed of the R515 in a lot of cases,” said Mr. Demers.

Besides, the interview reveals some uncovered things about the Radeon X1000 architecture in general.

“The new dispatcher was required to allow for a linearly scalable ALU architecture (say that 5 times fast!). The R3xx/R4xx sequencer was never designed with this in mind, so it had to be redesigned for that, at least. But it's more than that. With triple the ALU demand to texture resource, we need to be even more efficient on hiding the texture fetch latency (as well as flow control), and the high thread counts of the X1K architecture easily allow for that. We've found that the R580 efficiency is on par with the R520’s, which indicates that our design and dispatcher are capable of pretty amazing efficiencies (and wasn't even taxed that hard on R520),” Eric Demers claims.

• Beyond3D: R580 Architecture Interview.

Sony Puts Aibo, Qrio to Sleep. Sony Halts Robot Production, Development

2:27 pm | Anton Shilov

Sony Corp., a major maker of consumer electronics, quietly announced – among other refocus and plant closing plans – intentions to abandon development and production of its entertainment robots Aibo and Qrio.

Sony’s Aibo and Qrio robots unveiled years ago were designed for entertainment only. While Sony used to “upgrade” the robots’ capabilities at least once a year in the past, the pace slowed-down recently, whereas the price was still high: about $2000 per unit. By contrast, competing products cost much less.

“The success stories of WowWee’s Robosapien and Roboraptor and iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum also served to highlight the price chasm between them and Aibo’s $2000 robot and their sub-$300 and sub-$200 offerings, although Aibo was always the more powerful robot with more motors, flexibility and artificial intelligence,” ExtremeTech web-site wrote in its news-story.

Sony will continue research and development of artificial intelligence.

• ExtremeTech: Sony Puts Aibo Robot Dog to Sleep. 

ATI Radeon X1900 Reviewed Around the Web. ATI’s Most-Recent Radeon Receive Reviewers’ Approval

2:26 pm | Anton Shilov

ATI Technologies’ Radeon X1900-series graphics cards released earlier this week was quickly adored by enthusiasts and reviewers for its high performance in forward-looking game titles as well as increased speed over the previous flagship Radeon X1800 offering in cases when high-quality graphics is enabled.

The Radeon X1900 graphics chip, also known under code-name R580, features 48 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader processors, 16 texture units, enlarged by 50% hierarchical Z-buffer (HyperZ buffer), higher amount of general purpose register arrays as well as Fetch4 feature designed to accelerate lookup of textures consisting of one component by the factor of four. The new chip naturally utilizes ATI’s ring-bus memory controller as well as other improvements found in the Radeon X1000 family.

“Looking at current applications, though, we can generally see performance increases over X1800 between 15%, even for the less shader bound titles, up to the mid 30% range for the more shader bound cases. ATI points out that with a mere 20% increase in transistors over X1800 they can triple one aspect of performance, and with titles that are available currently that die size increase corresponds exactly in performance,” said Beyon3D’s review.

“Overall, we have to give kudos to ATI for starting off 2006 with a such a bang. The company's problems in 2005 were well documented, so we won't rehash them here. Instead, we'll congratulate ATI for launching the Radeon X1900 so quickly, and thank them for keeping the rivalry between them and NVIDIA alive,” report by HotHardware wrote.

“Best for the games, best for the media playback, best for the future games – that’s what the Radeon X1900 XTX is, based on the numbers we have obtained,” X-bit labs’ review said.

• AnandTech: ATI's New Leader in Graphics Performance: The Radeon X1900 Series.
• Beyond3D: R580: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX & Crossfire Review.
• ExtremeTech: ATI's Bid to Get Back on Top: The Radeon X1900.
• FiringSquad: ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire Performance Preview.
• HotHardware: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here.
• The TechReport: ATI’s Radeon X1900 Series Graphics Cards.
• X-bit labs: The Fast and Furious: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX Review.

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